Election Countdown, 11 Days to Go: Reasons to be Brave.
‘Clear eyes. Full heart. Can't lose.’
Eminem, in the closing moments of the greatest ad ever shown on TV, for the Chrysler 200, at the 2011 Superbowl. The spirit of that ad was the struggle against being counted-out. This week Eminem introduced Barack Obama and Kamala Harris at a packed rally in Detroit, evoking the same spirit. (Screen shot from YouTube.)
This post will be limited to one theme: Quotes and clips on the theme of civic bravery. Which we could use at the moment.
I should say that this is not occasioned by two shocking illustrations of civic cowardice by the press in the past days. One was the revelation on Wednesday that the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, had forbidden the paper’s editorial page to endorse a candidate this year. That candidate would of course have been Kamala Harris, and evidently the owner feared irritating Donald Trump.
The other, hours ago, was the revelation today by the news side of the Washington Post that the paper’s owner, the multi-hundred-billionaire Jeff Bezos, had killed an endorsement of Harris that the paper had planned to run. The Post’s renowned former editor, Marty Baron, correctly called this on Xitter “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Do ed-page endorsements “matter,” in terms of moving votes in the famed seven swing states? No. People reading the papers already know where the candidates stand. Tens of millions of people have already voted.
But statements of principle matter crucially in revealing the soul and values of an institution. As Marty Baron said correctly in that same tweet, echoing experts in fascism like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a display of “preemptive surrender” by two of America’s strongest publications, owned by some of the world’s richest people, would only be taken by Donald Trump “as an invitation to further intimidation.”
More on the institutional failures of the press in the next installment.
Right now, let’s consider examples of civic courage. The musician David Byrne chose the name Reasons to be Cheerful for his fascinating site. Let’s consider examples of people offering Reasons to be Brave.
1) Stevens: ‘When America called, you answered.’
Stuart Stevens is now familiar as a cable-TV figure, a Lincoln Project stalwart, and a prolific author. My wife Deb and I have known him for years, since meeting when he was a chief strategist for Mitt Romney in 2012. His latest book, about the Vichy Republican GOP, is all too prescient. It is called The Conspiracy to End America.
Two days ago, Stevens had a post on Xitter that is worth quoting and thinking about. It expressed his confidence that Kamala Harris would win.
Stevens’s record as a seer is imperfect: 12 years ago he was confident about Romney’s chances (against Barack Obama) till the end. But he’s been right much more than he has been wrong. His latest post is worth reading carefully:
At this point in October 2020, I wrote a piece for the glorious BulwarkOnline, imploring my new Dem friends to finish the campaign with confidence and swagger. I wrote [then] that if I ran the Dem party, my message would be:
“We are going to crush Donald Trump and the sickness he represents. There are more of us than there are of them. We are right. They are wrong. This is our moment. This is our destiny. Walk with confidence. Do not falter. Victory will be ours.”
I once again make the plea. Arrogance is walking on the field, bragging you will win without having done the work. The Harris-Walz campaign and thousands of volunteers are doing the hard work. You've earned it.
No team wins the Superbowl thinking, "We might have a shot." This is yours. Walk out and take it. You will look back at this moment with quiet pride and satisfaction for the rest of your life, knowing that when America called, you answered.
There are more of us than there are of them. You will look back on this moment with quiet pride. When America called, you answered.
Press on. Be brave.
2) Carville: ‘A movement that marches with hope.’
Deb and I also have known James Carville for many years, starting when he and Paul Begala ran a (doomed) senatorial campaign for our friend Lloyd Doggett in Texas in 1984. We recommend the recent CNN documentary about Carville’s life and campaigns, Winning is Everything, Stupid.
Two days ago the NYT ran an op-ed by Carville called “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win.” I think the political press spends way too much time on polls and predictions. But I admire the intellectual clarity and courage of political operators like Carville (and Stevens) in putting their reputations on the line with forthright declarations of this sort. Someone musing about a “55 percent likelihood” of this or that winner can ride with any outcome and never be “wrong.” Carville and Stevens are not hedging.
The whole piece is worth reading. Carville ends with this:
My final reason is 100 percent emotional. We are constantly told that America is too divided, too hopelessly stricken by tribalism, to grasp the stakes. That is plain wrong.
If the Cheneys and A.O.C. get that the Constitution and our democracy are on the ballot, every true conservative and every true progressive should get it too. A vast majority of Americans are rational, reasonable people of good will. I refuse to believe that the same country that has time and again overcome its mistakes to bend its future toward justice will make the same mistake twice. America overcame Mr. Trump in 2020. I know that we know we are better than this…
A movement that marches with hope is 1,000 times as thunderous as a movement that marches with dread.
The bet James Carville is making in this piece is parallel to that of Stuart Stevens, a long-time political opponent. It is that, in the end and in the privacy of the voting booth, the men and especially the women of America will not knowingly again choose someone who is a convicted felon, who admires Adolf Hitler, whose mind is obviously deteriorating, whose most senior national-security staffers have warned urgently against him, who scoffs at Constitutional limits, who has no plausible platform, who knows nothing of US history, who brags about the most divisive Court ruling in modern history (Dobbs), who is a pawn of hostile foreign interests, who… [and so on].
The Stevens-Carville argument is different from the smug “we’re better than this!” that some Americans resort to, in the wake of school massacres or racial outrages. No, we are not better than that. We keep letting those things happen.
But Carville and Stevens are saying that most Americans will stop before pushing down the accelerator as the car heads toward the brink. Recall that Donald Trump lost by three million votes in 2016, and by seven million in 2020. (I’ll talk about the crazy Electoral College system next time. One indicator: no other country on Earth chooses its leader this way.)
If Stevens and Carville prove to be wrong, they’ll be wrong. If so, many people will need recalibrate what America “is,” and is capable of. Including me.
But people like these two are calling on Americans to face doubt and danger by being brave, as so many generations have done before, in much more dire and perilous circumstances.
3) Cheney, Harris, and Obama:
This past week Liz Cheney and Kamala Harris worked the “blue wall” states from Pennsylvania across the Midwest, and Harris was joined by Barack Obama and others at a huge rally in Georgia.
In all of these locales the message was: Precisely because time is short and the stakes are high and the prospects can be discouraging, it’s time to work even harder, rather than to give up.
Obama made this a standard riff. Each time he mentioned some new outrage from Donald Trump, the crowd would start to boo—and he’d immediately cut them off with: “Don’t boo! VOTE!” It became call-and-response. In her Blue Wall conversations with Harris, Liz Cheney would lay out their policy differences, but then say: We are absolutely together, in the only fight that matters.
At the very end of the last of these, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Harris gave her “Yes we can!” summary. You can see it starting at time 50:00 of the clip below.
I think the whole hour-long discussion is informative and encouraging. In the passage at the end, Harris segued from Putin and Ukraine to the choice for Americans:
On this [Ukraine] and so many issues, the stakes are extremely high.
But as a final point for now. This is not as much an issue of what we are against, as what we are for. And I’ll end where I started: We love our country. And our country is worth fighting for. (Applause.)That’s how I think of this.
We — our — our democracy will only be as strong as our willingness to fight for it.
Clear eyes. Full heart. Can’t lose.
4) ‘That’s who we are. That’s our story.’
The best ad I have ever seen on TV, I saw 13 years ago.